To be able to work strategically within your procurement organization, you need to have the ability to categorize the products and services that you are purchasing and understand the spend patterns within the categories to set strategies and targets for the procurement organization.
This topic is divided into one section describing the categorization using the procurement category assortment and another section for spend analysis.
With the Procurement Category Assortment you get a way to create a hierarchy of categories where you can group products and services with similar characteristics into a common category using different dimensions. The categories are then used as a base for your strategic planning within procurement.
The procurement category assortments are based on the regular part assortment structures, but also have some procurement specific dimensions added. An assortment flagged as a procurement category assortment can also use all features available for a regular assortment. You can have any number of levels in the structure and connect categorization dimensions to any level in the structure.
You must define which companies that will use the assortment and if the category assortment is default for the company or not. The default assortment will be used to find a category for purchase order lines created on the company, and this is used for ad hoc queries in purchasing. The Spend Analysis feature can however use any of the assortment structures set up for the company. Note that the categorization of purchase order lines will not consider the code part dimension described below.
It is possible to set up one or several responsible persons (representatives) for a category and their roles. One of the representatives could be marked as the main representative for the category.
The representatives can either be responsible for the category globally (all companies) or locally per company. Locally defined representatives have higher priority than globally defined representatives.
When adding a representative to a node in the structure (category), the representative will also be inherited to all sub-nodes (sub categories) in the structure. This could be overridden on any level in the structure.
To categorize the procured products and services, you can make use of a number of different dimensions connected to the category assortment structure. Depending on the source of the procured product or service, different dimensions are applicable. When the system categorizes a spend transaction, it tries to find a category based on a pre-defined sequence of the dimensions according to the below details.
For purchase order lines you can use the following dimensions (in priority order):
For purchase order charge lines you can use the following dimensions (in priority order):
For sub contracts you can use the following dimensions (in priority order):
For manually posted invoices (including externally loaded) the following dimension is used:
For expenses you can use the following dimensions (in priority order):
Being able to analyze the historic spend within a category is a prerequisite to be able to understand the procurement patterns within the category and based on that set strategies and targets for the procurement organization going forward. You need to understand what you are buying, who are you buying from, who are buying, how often etc. This is called spend analysis and is a central part of the strategic planning process.
The spend analysis process could be divided into four different steps, which is described in more detail below.
Create an Analysis ID and specify which procurement category assortment to use as a basis for the categorization, in which currency you want to do the analysis from which date you want the data to be captured, and which sources to include in the analysis. For expenses, you can also define which type of expenses to include in the spend analysis.
Identify the companies you want to include in the specific analysis, and if the company does not have the analysis currency as either accounting or parallel currency, you also need to specify which currency rate type you want to use when converting the values to the analysis currency.
When running the job to generate the spend analysis data, the system will pick up spend transactions from different sources in the application and categorize each transaction based on the dimensions set up in your procurement category assortment.
When you run the job for an Analysis ID we are accumulating the data based on the analysis settings. The system will capture all spend transactions that has been created from the last time you executed the job and add new lines to the analysis. For sources with references to invoices, only spend transactions where the invoices has been Finally Posted within the time period will be considered and for expenses, only Authorized expenses are considered.
The job could either be started directly once or scheduled to run on a regular basis (i.e. weekly or monthly). Note that the user that starts the job must have access to all companies and sites included in the spend analysis for the job to be executed in the background.
When the data has been generated, you can clean and re-categorize the data before doing the actual analysis. The activities you can perform are:
Since there will be big data volumes, the recommendation is to do the analysis using a dedicated business intelligence tool that are using the information sources and tabular models as a basis. There is an information source called spend analysis that can be accessed from IFS Business Reporter as well as a tabular model and an example report in Power BI.